IPv6 is a new protocol to replace the current IPv4 system. These protocols assign numbers to computers on a network and specify how they can send messages (route) to each other. It is part of the backbone of the Internet, but we’ve actually already run out of IPv4 addresses! We’ve been trying to switch to IPv6 for a while, because it provides trillions of unique addresses that we’ll never exhaust. Unfortunately uptake has been very slow. Only 0.3% of requests to Google are over IPv6 at the time of writing this.

World IPv6 Day is meant to help raise awareness and encourage software and hardware vendors and ops teams to make their products and services IPv6 capable. Some big companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo! are all taking part.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 at 11:36 and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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